STATE OF POWER 2018

Madrid’s Community Gardens

Where neighbourhood counter-powers put down roots

José Luis Fernández Casadevante Kois, Nerea Morán and Nuria del Viso

The main feature of power is that it inevitably creates resistance, a process Foucault studied in detail. There are no harmonious societies. Conflicts of interest between different social groups have been a constant throughout history, and are probably the main driver of social change. Counter-power emerged as a means of collective action whereby the injustices suffered by subordinate or oppressed social groups become politicized, either in the form of silent rebellions that remain latent in everyday life or through challenges that are publicly and openly declared.

The forms this collective action takes have varied over time, due to factors such as technological developments, cultural changes or socio-institutional processes. The idea of counter-power has always been ambivalent: on the one hand, it is defined negatively by its capacity to say NO and prevent the hegemonic elites from carrying out their agenda; on the other, it transmits an assertive strength, a capacity to say YES and deploy new sensibilities, desires, ways of organizing and alternative lifestyles. Destituent and constituent power are two sides of the same coin.

Our cognitive reflexes tend to associate social struggles with images of revolts, mass mobilizations and epic insurrections, where conflict is dramatized. In the urban context, its mythological architecture would be the barricade – an ephemeral construction that symbolizes two worlds in conflict, made of the magic cobblestones that rise up to form fortresses described by Baudelaire.

But what if, rather than the barricade, we were to think of counter-power in terms of a space such as a community garden?

But what if, rather than the barricade, we were to think of counter-power in terms of a space such as a community garden? We would speak of defending the existence of spaces where the lives of local communities and plants are cared for, food is grown and social relationships are harvested, of neighbourhood and environmental ecosystems threatened by the market and urban policies.

Let’s think of the workers’ movement with its unions and parties, consumer and worker cooperatives, mutual societies, newspapers and magazines, folk schools, cultural centres and libraries, people’s houses, choirs, bands, excursion clubs, theatre groups, women’s associations, mutual support networks in neighbourhoods… We will find a whole world run according to its own principles and rules – a constellation of community institutions where people could socialize, practise solidarity, and reproduce a culture and lifestyles that operate independently of power. Does it not seem reductionist to think that this complex multiplicity, overflowing with life, was a mere exercise in the accumulation of forces awaiting the day of the revolution?

Counter-power interests us because it refers to inhabiting a conflict without being obsessed with confrontation, and acknowledges that building new social relations can be a gesture of radical defiance. This connects with historical socialist and anarchist tendencies whose efforts were aimed at developing initiatives and projects that foresaw what a non-capitalist society would look like. Long ago, the Labour Party activist G. D. H. Cole wisely stated that the revolution should look as little like a civil war as possible and as similar as possible to a record of events and a culmination of existing trends.

This is why we will emphasize the positive, constituent dimension of counter-power and track experiences that are able to transform our cities and people’s lives, bringing about small-scale radical changes at the same time. We will follow the trail of the real utopias studied all over the world by Erik Olin Wright, where what is pragmatically possible depends on our imagination and takes shape based on our visions of reality and our ways of inhabiting it differently.

Just as the escaped slaves in Brazil founded settlements hidden in the jungle, known as quilombos, in our concrete jungles today there is a wide range of modest counter-powers that are hidden, undervalued and kept out of sight. We will mention a few of them and then focus on one example: community gardens, specifically in Madrid.

Resisting austerity urbanism

A city is more than a place in space, it is a drama in time - P. Geddes

The financial crash that began in 2008 put an end to the illusion of a model of economic growth increasingly disconnected from meeting social needs. Cities have borne the brunt of the dramatic social and economic impacts of the crash (household debt, evictions, high unemployment, energy poverty, inability to afford food, deterioration and privatization of public service, etc.), which have given rise to a serious loss of social cohesion.

This process was aggravated by the application of an austerity urbanism that opened the door to the private sector in service provision and management, giving it an ever more important role in the definition of strategic guidelines for urban transformation. This restructuring of urban policies is based on processes such as the promotion of megaprojects and mega-events, public–private partnerships (PPPs), opening up the most interesting sectors to foreign investment, unequal public service provision depending on the purchasing power of different neighbourhoods, gentrification, and the commodification of sectors such as environmental management, green areas or even the public space itself.

Investors, property developers and large corporations have driven the creeping commodification of the city, with the result that markets determine the direction taken by urban governments.

Investors, property developers and large corporations have driven the creeping commodification of the city, with the result that markets – disconnected from social needs and free from political oversight – determine the direction taken by urban governments. And citizens have suffered the dramatic consequences: market authoritarianism and the erosion of local democracies, booming corruption, an increase in environmentally unsustainable processes and an exponential growth in inequality.

This cyclical movement throughout history has provoked the activation of society’s self-protection mechanisms, in what Polanyi defined in The Great Transformation as a ‘double movement’. The threat of a free-market utopia generates antibodies capable of repoliticizing everyday life and deploying multiple alternative projects aimed at subordinating the economy to politics.

The official narrative of the crisis began to be questioned publicly in Spain with the emergence of the 15M movement in 2011, which launched the most intense cycle of collective action in the country’s recent history. The protest camps and assemblies formed micro-cities at the heart of a larger city in a sort of project proposal for other cities, generating an atmosphere more favourable to social change.

Against austerity urbanism, what emerged from civil society was cooperative urbanism, intensive in its capacity to innovate to solve problems, citizen leadership and more democratic ways of understanding the public sphere. In Spain, responses to the crisis have taken different forms: campaigns to stop evictions and recover homes, led by the Platform of People Affected by Mortgages (Plataforma de Afectados por las Hipotecas, PAH); citizen tides in defence of public services such as health and education, bringing together users, professionals and trade unions; the restoration of buildings to set up community centres; the organization of food banks for vulnerable families; neighbourhood support and solidarity networks against the exclusion of migrants from health services; or the takeover of abandoned properties to plant community gardens.

The plurality of resistance is not just defensive action against the loss of rights and the lack of resources and basic services, but a recovery of collective thinking and proposal-making.

The greatest successes of this plurality of counter-powers have been to discredit the story about the crisis; to put a stop to the most aggressive policies to privatize health, education or water; to popularize acts of civil disobedience (stopping evictions, occupations, refusing to pay higher taxes on medicines, medical care for undocumented people); to present popular legislative initiatives aimed at changing the legal framework, the outstanding example being the PAH proposal on the right to housing; and to develop a non-hegemonic use of international law, leading to several condemnations of the Spanish state for human rights violations. This is not just defensive action against the loss of rights and the lack of resources and basic services, but a recovery of collective thinking and proposal-making.

This cycle of mobilization has consolidated a modest, imperceptible geography of resistance that takes the form of different ways of thinking about, imagining and inhabiting the territory.

Whether intentionally or unconsciously, in solving problems counter-powers tend to promote alternative urban models where different lifestyles can develop. They do this by re-signifying and politicizing concepts such as the neighbourhood or the public space, and by producing places where new social and practical relationships can be (re)built: community centres, community gardens, community-run equipment, the reinvention of empty or under-used public spaces.

Living in a different way implies the material construction of arenas where – albeit on a small, fragmented scale – it is possible to reproduce other patterns of relationships among people and between people and their surroundings.

Planting change in the city square

They can cut all the flowers, but they can’t stop the coming of spring.- Pablo Neruda.

This citizen counter-power was enacted in the protest camps that from 2010 onwards spread to large cities all over the world, from Tahrir Square to Madrid’s Puerta del Sol, from Occupy Wall Street to Gezi Park, as people demanded more democracy and rose up against ‘austericidal’ policies.

With thousands of people living side by side in the protest camps, the public space was seen as a collective, political site. The occupation of this space was ‘potentially permanent and self-managed’, making it a metaphor of another way of inhabiting the city, reinventing the public space as a common space, ‘a performative representation of justice and equality’, where people could protest in common, think in common, live in common and explore alternative values in common.

The protest camps were structured as temporary cities, with different spaces for different activities and needs: children’s areas, libraries, communication and information centres, dining areas, solar panels. In many of these camps, between the tarpaulins and the assemblies, community gardens somehow also found a space that was sometimes symbolic or evocative. Spaces where the community living in the camp imagined itself and made plans for the future, such as in the Huerta del Sol in Madrid, where there was a sign saying ‘if we last 40 days we will eat lettuces’.

Mural of Teatro Polivalente Ocupato in Bolonia. Credit: Kois.

A new community is invoked around the idea of the garden, rethinking relations and symbols in places affected by conflict. Thus, Greek and Turkish Cypriot activists from Occupy the Buffer Zone in Nicosia set up camp on the disputed land. One of the ways they took ownership of this space, left a mark on it and gave it a new meaning was the Greening up the Green Line action, which involved building a small vegetable patch and ‘seed bomb’ workshops. These actions sought to give a new meaning to the green of the so-called green line (the demilitarized zone that separates the island), turning it into a cultivated landscape. These were temporary, shifting spaces, designed to highlight political demands and make links with other movements and spaces that were already there.

Thus, in Occupy Rome, the city’s guerrilla gardening groups and community garden (CG) collectives, organized their first joint action with the design and construction of the Orto Errante, based on movable vegetable patches; Occupy Wall Street organized workshops and guided visits to the community gardens in the Lower East Side; in Barcelona, the agroecology movement attended various protests with a nomadic garden, which ended up being seized by the police; and Occupy San Francisco planted an organic garden opposite the headquarters of Monsanto.

Elsewhere, the protest camps led to starting up projects that aimed to be permanent, such as Occupy the Farm, an urban farm on an occupied site in the University of California, Berkeley, or the People’s Peas Garden located in a public park and run by Occupy Gardens Toronto, which was active for five months until it was dismantled. After the camps were taken down, the seeds of ideas planted by these gardens germinated elsewhere, as illustrated by the Puerta del Sol camp, which was dismantled to shouts of ‘We’re not leaving, we’re moving to your conscience’.

Mural of Adelfas community garden. 'Many small gardens cultivate small peoples who will change the world' Credit: Alberto del Rio

So, when neighbourhood assemblies in Spain start to work on their local environments, they often develop community garden projects. This has happened from Madrid and Barcelona to Burgos or Málaga, where the very name of the gardens reflects those origins: Horts Indignats in Barcelona, Huerta Dignidad in Málaga (in reference to the 2014 Marches for Dignity).

Community gardens emerged as one of many forms of protest against the malaise caused by the neoliberal global city and its urbanicidal dynamics (too many institutions and not enough government, exclusion and the dual labour market, the politics of fear, deteriorating public services, unsustainability and so forth).

Urban agriculture has become a means to denounce speculation and demand a new culture of the territory. It has also enabled the creation of social and economic alternatives linking a wide range of social actors and collectives, from green activist groups to unemployed people’s assemblies, from neighbourhood associations to popular solidarity networks.

Documentary portraying Madrid's community gardens

Community gardens or rooted counter-power

The gardens symbolised the opposition to what was happening. The possibility of building a better city based on the interests of local communities, an expression of people working together. The opposite of racial segregation, individualism and the urban renewal strategies that benefit only the rich and powerful.- C. Khan

In common with other critical social movements, the community gardens presented their demands under the umbrella of the right to the city, understood not as a legal claim, but as citizens’ right to intervene in the city, to build it and transform it.

This symbolic framework can be used to connect with other essential demands (against neighbourhood segregation and stigmatization, forced displacements, evictions, the criminalization of poverty) for imagining a socially just city, into which experiences like the community gardens incorporate issues such as urban ecology and food sovereignty.

The urban agriculture movement reveals and poses questions that go beyond the gardens themselves, calling on people to participate and share responsibility for our lifestyles and how we manage resources that are located beyond the city limits but are essential for the city’s subsistence in a context of social and ecological crisis, exemplified by climate collapse and the energy crisis.

Together with the right to the city, another central pillar in the ideas and practices of the urban agriculture movement is the notion of the commons. Indeed, the CG defined themselves as the urban commons from the outset. Thus, for Karl Linn they are neighbourhood commons, meeting spaces built and managed by people living in degraded areas of deprived neighbourhoods. The urban commons revive traditional practices of community management of natural, strategic resources the community needs to reproduce, and adapt them to the urban setting.

One of the strengths that give the community gardens their radical nature and transformative capacity is their goal of creating a community in the broad sense, around sharing and collectively managing a space, resources (soil, seeds, water, tools), certain benefits (harvests, social recognition), and a group of people who define their own rules and organization. This has led to the community gardens also being defined as green urban commons: ‘green spaces located in urban settings, with diverse forms of ownership and a wide range of rights, including the right to create their own management arrangements and to decide who they want to include in that system of management’.

The community gardens are self-organized, non-hierarchical experiences that combine a critique of the dominant model of the city with the mobilization of emancipatory practices and ideas. Against the ideology of homo economicus, the idea of the community refers to the way in which people create their own community intentionally, reflexively and by engaging in dialogue, generating groups that see themselves as inclusive, open, flexible, porous and rooted in the neighbourhood.

The neighbourhood is that sphere between the productive and the reproductive, between the private, known, domestic space and the public space, comprising the larger, more abstract city that cannot be encompassed in its totality. In the community gardens, the sense of belonging to the neighbourhood is defined culturally rather than geographically, seeking to involve and appeal to neighbours whose definition as a group is likewise flexible, as it refers to people who work collectively in the neighbourhood and not so much to their place of residence.

This sense of community belonging that characterizes the urban gardens is underlined by a gardener from Madrid, an unemployed architect: ‘It’s not a question of each person having their own plot, or each person managing, working and harvesting a separate, fenced-off area. That’s something people find very unsettling – they’re surprised that you’d go and put in the work without knowing what you’re going to get out of it’.

Because what is grown is not for commercial purposes, the gardens promote a sort of gift economy, where what each person contributes and what they receive is not quantified.

Another gardener from the same garden explains it like this: ‘This spade is not mine, neither is this plant. Because all of it is everyone’s, I have more of a sense of belonging. It feels more important to me, I have to look after it and defend it more than if it was mine or someone else’s. It’s everyone’s space and no-one’s space – a common good that we can all enjoy but that doesn’t belong to us’. For another gardener, ‘Being a community means working more on the basis of questions than answers. Things get decided through consultation, nobody imposes their views’.

For a gardener in one of Madrid’s oldest gardens , Adelfas, the community garden is ‘a place where we can go back to what a neighbourhood used to be, talk to the neighbours in a space that’s not commercial or defined by consumerism’. Another adds: ‘It’s a place where we do things collectively and connect with the earth, a place to be with people who have something in common, a part of the neighbourhood that’s really ours, unlike the park that’s cold and impersonal’.

The community gardens are self-organized, non-hierarchical experiences that combine a critique of the dominant model of the city with the mobilization of emancipatory practices and ideas.

Agroecology, self-management and social ties are the three features that define their work at the local level, where people grow food and harvest social relationships. Because they are in the public space, the community gardens are highly visible, attractive experiences, and very active in making connections with other initiatives (community centres, neighbourhood associations, consumer groups, cyclists’ collectives, education associations and schools, for instance), which means that they reweave the local social fabric.

As time goes by, the meeting space and relationships with other people become key to the group’s cohesion and competes in attractiveness with the gardening dimension, which was initially more relevant. As one gardener says, ‘When we didn’t know each other so well, we mostly talked about plants. Now we know each other we talk more about what’s going on in our lives’. Another gardener, the treasurer of one of the largest gardens in Madrid, Huerto Batán, expresses her motivation in similar terms: ‘Now, rather than the tomatoes, the important thing is relating to other people’.

As well as the immediate activity, the community gardens prefigure what people would like their city to look like in the future, expressing the need for neighbourhoods that are more participatory, shared spaces, together with the introduction of more eco-urbanism (sustainable transport, proximity, renewable energies, composting, closing cycles).

Madrid community garden history

The community gardens were born in local communities that organized to regenerate degraded urban spaces on a small scale by occupying abandoned properties, spaces between buildings or underused green areas. These empty spaces once again became inhabited, combining a modest reconstruction of the site, emphasizing the use value of the urban space, with a relational rehabilitation that seeks to restore the quality of the space by intensifying social relations (organizing activities such as street parties, community meals or cultural initiatives).

The protest side of the gardens was there from the start, revealing how far urban development policies and expert knowledge have diverged from the needs and aspirations of the city’s inhabitants. The action of occupying the space reflects the absence of ways to engage in a fruitful dialogue with local institutions, and reclaims the right of communities and citizens to take ownership of the public space and apply ‘collaborative planning and management practices to recreate it and think about what it should look like in the future’.

The movement began at the start of the twenty-first century with a few isolated initiatives taken forward by neighbourhood associations and ecologists, who by 2010 had set up coordination networks such as the Red de Huertos Urbanos Comunitarios de Madrid (RED). Since the 15M movement in 2011 many neighbourhood assemblies have been setting up gardens in different areas of Madrid, definitively locating this issue in the public sphere and putting it on the political agenda.

Sharing a meal in Adelfas community garden. Credit: Alberto del Rio

The RED serves to raise the profile of all the initiatives, encourage the exchange of experiences (visits, meeting), share resources (seed nursery, seed exchange, buying manure collectively), create mutual support mechanisms and promote training events (learning days, courses), as well as offering a resource space that can provide advice and support to people and groups interested in taking forward new initiatives.

Right from the start, the instability inherent in the occupation of land and the scarcity of resources led the RED to seek dialogue with the Madrid City Council, in order to regularize the status of the gardens and push for the launch of a municipal programme that would enable them to form part of the city’s green infrastructure on a permanent basis.

Between internal tensions and lengthy assembly meetings, sites being dismantled and occupied, protests and photo exhibitions, support from universities and international recognition (UN-HABITAT’s Good Practice Award for Urban Sustainability), the RED gained legitimacy as an interlocutor in negotiations.

Following a lengthy hard bargaining with one of Spain’s most neoliberal municipal governments, the status of the first 17 community gardens was regularized in 2014. The gardens are located on sites categorized as green areas, and the right to use them is awarded in a public bidding process. In the list of terms and conditions a balance has been struck between respect for the uniqueness of citizen initiatives and their autonomy, while offering legal security to the City Council, in an innovative procedure that could be replicated in other cities.

This major victory was won after exploring the shifting sands of dialogue with the city government, without dying in the attempt, proposing new forms of engaging with state institutions from positions of conflict and not just confrontation, eventually progressing towards dialogue and even cooperation. This giant step has enabled the community agriculture initiatives in the capital to consolidate and in just a few years to increase to nearly 60 regularized projects today.

Map of Madrid community gardens

The community garden map is the opposite of a tourist map, which shows only the city centre, because the low-income neighbourhoods predominate, especially those on the outskirts where most initiatives are concentrated. In the city centre, where urban development is denser, it is much more difficult to find a physical space. Even so, the decisive variable is the thick social and neighbourhood fabric that the gardens require, which is more likely to be found in outlying neighbourhoods.

The institutionalization process is in the early stages and is gradually becoming consolidated, respecting the autonomy and non-party-political nature of the initiatives. In addition, since a municipalist coalition took over the City Council in 2015 further steps have been taken, advancing the joint development of public policies aimed at recognizing and maximizing the creativity and collective intelligence in our cities, involving citizens and the social fabric in designing and implementing policies that concern them.

This has led to the regularization of more gardens, including those located on non-residential land on a temporary basis, the building of the Municipal Urban Gardening School, consolidating a training plan to support community gardens jointly managed by the Red de Huertos, and the launch of a pilot project for community agro-composting.

Municipalism is a walking paradox – discomforting to central government powers and business interests, but also to local counter-powers, who are obliged to leave their comfort zone, abandon the logic of resistance and play a leading role in securing new rights

Municipalism is a walking paradox – discomforting to central government powers and business interests, but also to local counter-powers, who are obliged to leave their comfort zone, abandon the logic of resistance and accept a change in their identity that will enable them to play a leading role in a scenario where securing new rights becomes feasible. Counter-powers seen from above, powers seen from below.

The ‘city councils for change’ find themselves in an unusual and paradoxical position between the pragmatism of the moment and the utopian impulse to bring about change. They are giving life to a space where it is possible to create more suitable ecosystems and environments for the experiments that are autonomously prefiguring another society. These are local governments that facilitate, support, and strengthen new forms of social institutions.

How do these green islands operate?

The community gardens are organized as an assembly, where proposals are made and important decisions are taken. They also operate with working groups that are set up to coordinate specific tasks. Alongside these, are informal mechanisms based on thematic leadership – the person who knows about the specific topic and can take the initiative decides how to do it – and decision-making by those who are most often present in the space.

The work draws on the knowledge and experience of all the members, creating a climate of knowledge-sharing and ongoing, collective knowledge-production in response to the problems that arise.

Tasks tend to be organized depending on each person’s preferences and knowledge, although there are mechanisms to ensure that people take turns to do the most unpleasant ones – such as sweeping or stirring the compost.

A gardener from Adelfas, remarks how ‘there comes a time in this process when you have to do things you wouldn’t necessarily choose to. You might like the idea of spending the day with this person who’s a specialist in something and learn first-hand how they do their work, but you take responsibility and do whatever it’s your turn to do that day’.

Working in Bombilla community garden. Credit: Zuloark

The harvest – a motivation more symbolic than material – is divided among everyone present and is seldom a source of conflict. However, care is taken to ensure that it is shared out fairly. On one occasion, an older man broke a bone in his foot while working in the garden and was unable to go back for some time, but his share of each harvest was set aside for him and someone would take it to his house since his work had helped to grow the vegetables.

Some initiatives collect modest cash contributions from members, although people who cannot afford to pay are not excluded from joining the project. Others raise funds by making food or selling merchandise − badges, canvas bags, etc.− as well as by collecting voluntary individual contributions.

The practice of urban ecological agriculture is often the main initial attraction. Later, working and spending time with other people means that relationships tend to become more important than the vegetable-growing tasks as such. Gradually, a network of relationships is woven and encourages solidarity and mutual support.

Of course, as in any social setting, there are disagreements and disputes over how to manage the space or do the work, or because of misunderstandings. However, conflict is not usually seen as something to avoid, but rather an issue to be addressed. This is why some gardens in Madrid have developed their own regulations for dealing with conflict, and even make use of mediation processes through the RED.

From islands of green to an archipelago

The difference between a group of islands and an archipelago is the existence of connections between them. Thus, once the gardens had put down roots in the neighbourhoods and become part of the social ecosystem, they and the RED focused on building bridges, gaining more allies, linking up with other campaigns and coordinating with other actors on various scales.

The advocacy work done by the community garden goes beyond their own neighbourhoods and their influence extends to the city as a whole, where they are making their own specific contribution to changing the urban model.

These projects are involved in multiple mobilization networks both at the urban and the translocal scale, linked to citizen participation, food sovereignty and agroecology. In 2015, the RED coordinated the First National Meeting of Urban Community Gardens. The ultimate aim is to transcend their own neighbourhood and become involved in a wider movement by connecting these islands to others, eventually consolidating ever-expanding archipelagos that break the bounds of established institutional structures and dominant practices.

Might the fruits be seeds?

Madrid’s gardens have gained significant symbolic power as metaphors for social creativity, for citizens’ capacity to give abandoned spaces back their use value, for caring for nature in the city, and for the building of alternatives by autonomous citizens.

As well as mobilizing alternative ideas and becoming a means of protest, the community gardens have been a valid practical way to bring the organizational dynamics and critical discourses developed by the 15-M movement to neighbourhoods and municipalities. They are also fostering connections between the various pre-existing group or neighbourhood processes, thus diversifying their participant profile thanks to their constructive and inclusive nature.

Locally, the community gardens bring together a range of feelings, demands and claims (environmental, neighbourhood, political, relational), while simultaneously stimulating processes of neighbourhood self-management that place emphasis on direct participation, taking ownership of the space, the rebuilding of identities and the shared responsibility of the community as a whole for the different issues that affect the people who live there.

These exercises in micro-urbanism express people’s disagreement with the dominant model of the city and the lifestyles it induces.

The community gardens are an expression of the emergence of a cooperative urbanism, intensive in citizen leadership and more democratic ways of understanding the public sphere. The gardens imply processes of urban rehabilitation, both in the form of small-scale material changes and, especially, in the form of relational rehabilitation, in how links are developed among people and between people and their surroundings.

A garden doesn’t change the world; it changes the people who are going to change the world

The community gardens act on the production and transformation of the urban space through their impact on human relationships and lifestyles rather than via major works of physical refurbishment.

A habitable counter-power is one that allows people to experience in the here and now the major features of the future life to which we aspire, a process of immanent transformation that cannot be reduced to strategic calculations regarding the accumulation of forces and irreversible revolutions.

The anarchist Paul Goodman used to say: ‘Suppose you had the revolution you are talking and dreaming about. Suppose your side had won, and you had the kind of society that you wanted. How would you live, you personally, in that society? Start living that way now!’

As a mural in one Madrid community garden says: ‘A garden doesn’t change the world; it changes the people who are going to change the world’. The challenge for these projects is to keep their more political contours without losing their capacity to bring about change.

Connecting the garden to the world. Photo-action against TTIP in Adelfas community garden. Credit: Manuel Muñoz

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

José Luis Fernández Casadevante Kois is a sociologist and international expert on food sovereignty for UNIA. He is also a member of the work cooperative GARUA and has been a neighbourhood activist for more than a decade, involved currently in promoting urban agriculture projects through the Urban Gardens of the Regional Federation of Neighbourhood Associations (FRAVM). His blog can be found at Raices en el asfalto.

Nerea Morán Alonso is an architecture postgraduate at Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. She has participated in various projects and research networks on agrofood systems, neighbourhood regeneration and sustainable and resilient cities. She is a founding member of the Surcos Urbanos, an association committed to training, research, awareness-raising and technical support in participatory urban and food system planning. She is an urban agriculture and agroecological activist, active currently in the Madrid Agroecological platform.

Nuria del Viso has a Masters in Anthropology from the Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED) and a degree in journalism from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid with a Diploma in Advanced Peace and Security studies from UNED. She has worked as a journalist on economic affairs and development aid. Since 2004, she has worked in the FUHEM (CIP y FUHEM Ecosocial) Foundation on issues of socio-ecological conflicts, peace and security. She is part of the editorial board of the magazine Papeles de relaciones ecosociales y cambio global.

12. Court stops construction of Kenya’s coal power plant. Petitioners from Lamu celebrating the judgment of the National Environment Tribunal, 26 June (Twitter/(@deCOALonize)

Sudan’s Third Revolution

Sudan’s “Third revolution” began in the northern town of Atbara in December 2018. Street protests began after the removal of a wheat subsidy, escalating to sustained civil disobedience for about eight months. The protests led to a major political shift, when President Omar al-Bashir was deposed after thirty years in power.

A Transitional Military Council (TMC) replaced al-Bashir, but protesters held their ground, and in July and August 2019 the TMC and the civilian-led Forces of Freedom and Change alliance (FFC) signed a Political Agreement and a Draft Constitutional Declaration legally defining a planned 39-month phase of transitional state institutions and procedures to return Sudan to civilian democracy.

In August and September 2019, the TMC formally transferred executive power to a mixed military–civilian collective head of state, the Sovereignty Council of Sudan, and to a civilian prime minister (Abdalla Hamdok) and a mostly civilian cabinet, while judicial power was transferred to Nemat Abdullah Khair, Sudan’s first female Chief Justice.

Chilean protests challenge neoliberal state

The 2019 Chilean protests are ongoing. The protests began in Santiago, Chile’s capital, as a coordinated fare evasion campaign by secondary school students protesting increases in metro fares. This led to spontaneous takeovers of the city’s main train stations and eventually to open confrontations with the Chilean Police.

These protests morphed into a nationwide call to address inequality and improve social services. Soon millions were on the streets, forcing President Sebastián Piñera to increase benefits for the poor and disadvantaged,and to start a process of constitutional reform.

On 25 October, over a million people protested against President Piñera, demanding his resignation. Piñera has already canceled some interest payments on student loans, but protesters are demanding more relief for education payments and related debt.

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On Jan. 1, 2019, 5.5 million women in the Indian state of Kerala (population 35 million) built a 386-mile human chain, spanning almost the entire state,to bring light to the issues women face in India.

The women gathered and took a vow to “defend the renaissance traditions” of their state, and to work towards women’s empowerment. In particular, they marched for an end to violence and intimidation against women trying to enter Kerala’s Sabarimala temple, a popular Hindu pilgrimage site.

Undoubtedly larger than the historical Women’s March in Washington, D.C. in 2017, this was one of the largest mobilizations in the world for women’s rights.

Algerian protests pave the way towards democracy

These protests, without precedent since the Algerian Civil War, have been peaceful and led the military to insist on president Bouteflika’s immediate resignation, which took place on 2 April 2019. By early May, a significant number of power-brokers close to the deposed administration, including the former president’s younger brother Saïd, had been arrested.

On 1 November, the metro was shut down in Algiers and trains into the city were canceled following a social media campaign calling for demonstrations. Police roadblocks also caused traffic jams. For the 37th weekly Friday protest, which coincided with the celebration of the 65th anniversary of the start of the Algerian War for independence from France, tens of thousands of demonstrators called for all members of the system of power in place to be dismissed and for a radical change in the political system.

There has not been an overhaul of the political regine, and protestors have returned to the streetsafter an election held on 12 December, arguing that the winner Abdelmadjid Tebboune, 74,and the four other candidates were closely linked with the rule of the deposed Mr Bouteflika.

The statement calls on member states to “promote alternatives to conviction and punishment in appropriate cases, including the decriminalization of drug possession for personal use”.

While a number of UN agencies have made similar calls in the past, this CEB statement means it is now the common position for the entire UN family of agencies. Crucially, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime – the lead UN agency on drug policy – has also endorsed the position; finally clarifying their previously ambiguous position on decriminalisation.

The statement also positions drug policy clearly within public health, human rights, and sustainable development agendas. It represents a welcome and significant step towards ‘system wide coherence’ within the UN system on drug policy.

This has been a key call of civil society groups long frustrated by the lack of coherence across the UN and the marginalisation of health, rights and development agendas by UN drug agencies whose historic orientation has been towards punishment, law enforcement and eradication.

The United Kingdom bans fracking

In October, Scotland banned fracking with immediate effect, arguing that it is “incompatible” with tackling the climate change emergency.The Scottish government said the position of “no support” for fracking followed “a comprehensive period of evidence-gathering and consultation” that started in 2013. The decision thus came after six years of deliberations.In November, England also put a halt to fracking in a watershed moment for environmentalists and community activists.

The decision has been welcomed as a “victory for common sense” by green groups and campaigners who have fought for almost a decade against the controversial fossil fuel extraction process.

Same-sex marriage reform in Asia

Taiwan legalized same-sex marriage on 24 May 2019, following a 2017 constitutional court ruling. Despite intense local and regional opposition, Taiwan became the first nation in Asia to permit same-sex marriage.

Thailand seems to be well on its way to becoming the second Asian country, and the first in South-East Asia, to legalize same sex unions.

Court stops construction of Kenya’s coal power plant

Kenyan judges stopped plans to construct the country’s first ever coal-powered plant near the coastal town of Lamu, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Local communities and criticsargued that the plant would have dire economic and health effects.

A tribunal canceled the license issued by the National Environmental Management Authority, arguing that the Authority had failed to conduct a thorough environmental assessment.The tribunal ordered developer Amu Power to undertake a new evaluation. The environmental court also faulted the Chinese-backed power plant for failing to adequately consult the public about the initiative, and cited insufficient and unclear plans for handling and storing toxic coal ash.

The project has drawn protests since its inception, with environmentalists saying coal has no place in a country that already develops most of its energy from hydroelectric and geothermal power. Campaigners have also argued that the plant will devastate the island of Lamu, a major tourist attraction, a UNESCO heritage site, and the oldest and best-preserved example of a Swahili settlement in East Africa.

The ruling was a win for environmental activists and local communities, who for three years argued the coal plant would not only pollute the air but also damage the fragile marine ecosystem and devastate the livelihoods of fishing communities.

While the latest verdict delays the coal plant’s development, it doesn’t put an end to it. Amu Power can still apply for a new license or appeal the decision within the next month. For now, though, local communities are celebrating the win.

Public banks are being embraced across the United States

In October 2019, AB 857 — the grassroots-generated, people-powered Public Banking Act — became law in California. This was the outcome of years of work by the California Public Banking Alliance, which did the work of educating legislators, drafting language, and generating massive statewide public support for the bill.

The bill opens the way for public banks to offer a people-controlled alternative to the private, profit-driven Wall Street banks that have failed to serve the public. It paves the way for a growth in public banking in California, the largest state economy in the largest national economy in the world.

Progressives and conservatives across the United States are pursuing more than twenty-five initiatives for public banks. Thirty of the fitty states have proposed legislation in support of publicly-owned banks, and more than fifty organisations are promoting public banks.

Listen to our podcast on Public Banks to see why this is a big development.

Hong Kong protestors showresilience and creativity in face of repression

Hong Kong has been rocked by pro-democracy, anti-government protests for more than five months now. The protests began in June with one main objective—for the government to withdraw a controversial bill that would have allowed extradition to mainland China. Critics worried Beijing could use the bill to prosecute people for political reasonsunder China’s opaque legal system.

By the time Hong Kong’s leader, Carrie Lam, agreed to withdraw the bill, it was too late to quell the movement, which quickly grew to include five major demands, all of them related to expansion of democratic space.

The protests have also led to big pro-democracy votes in their legislature, and some of the biggest mobilizations for democracy ever seen. The protests are ongoing at the time of writing, but Lam’s capitulation to the first demand has only emboldened protesters to pursue more substantial concessions.

Swiss women strike for gender equality

Hundreds of thousands of Swiss women went on strike to protest gender inequalities on 14 June 2019, precisely 28 years after the historic 1991 women’s strike in Switzerland that pressured the government to implement a constitutional amendment on gender equality. The 1991 strike led to the passage of the Gender Equality Act five years later, giving women legal protections from discrimination and gender bias in the workplace.

The women’s strike – known as Frauenstreik (German) and Grève des Femmes (French) online – consisted of demonstrations in the country’s major municipalities for equal pay, recognition of unpaid care work, and governmental representation.

The Swiss Parliament in Bern honored the strike with a 15-minute break in its business. In Basel, a giant fist was projected onto the Roche pharmaceutical company building. In some cities, protesters changed the names of streets to honor women. The Swiss paper, Le Temps, left sections blank where articles edited or written by women would have run.

While demands for equal pay dominated the strike, marchers also called for better protections against domestic violence and workplace harassment.

School kids and workers lead historic wave of climate actions

As global temperatures heat up, so too do demands for action. 2019 saw movements such as Extinction Rebellion, the Week of Global mobilization at the United Nations, and many other protests worldwide.

In September, youth climate activists across the world went on strike to demand immediate action from policy makers, in what has been described as the biggest protest and mobilization since the Anti-Iraq War marches. They brought the issues of climate and labour together by calling for a global climate strike in September 2019. An historic 7.6 million students, (grand) parents and workers from 185 countries participated. More than 70 trade unions around the world supported the general strike and the number of climate groups demanding just-transitions for fossil fuel workers are steadily increasing.

Investors are significant shareholders if they own over 5% of a company’s shares. The sample of firms here are the largest 205 public and private firms across the world, who have more than $50 billion in 2014 sales.

Public Institutions

An Institution is considered ‘public’ if guided by a public mandate, governed under public law and/or publicly-owned by state authorities or public sector entities.

Quantitative Easing

QE is an unconventional monetary policy aimed to stimulate economic activity. Central banks create new money and use this to buy government and corporate bonds from financial markets.

Top 17 Asset Management Firms

BlackRock, US

Vanguard Group, US

JP Morgan Chase, US

Allianz SE, Germany

UBS, Switzerland

Bank of America Merrill Lynch US

Barclays plc, UK

State Street Global Advisors, US

Fidelity Investments (FMR), US

Bank of New York Mellon, US

AXA Group, France

Capital Group, US

Goldman Sachs Group, US

Credit Suisse, Switzerland

Prudential Financial, US

Morgan Stanley & Co., US

Amundi/Crédit Agricole, France

G30

The Group of Thirty (G30) is a privately funded international group of 30 top financiers, academics and policy makers, whose aim is to influence policy and discourse in international finance and global politics.

Trilateral Commission

The Trilateral Commission is an unofficial (i.e. not officially overseen by governments) organisation where 375 global elites from 40 countries meet to tackle pressing international issues.

Shadow Banking

Shadow banking are financial institutions which lie outside of the formal banking regulatory system despite performing similar functions to banks, such as providing credit. Due to this, they raise and lend money more easily, but with considerably more risk.